The Pentagon: A History Read Online Free Page B

quite aggressive themselves, were taken aback. “He called himself a mean son-of-a-bitch, and he was,” said William Hoge, an engineer officer who would cross swords with him. “Watch Somervell,” it was said around the Army, and not always meant favorably.
    Assigned to the Army of Occupation in the Rhineland, Somervell enjoyed life stationed in the ancient city of Koblenz, founded by the Romans at the strategic confluence of the Rhine and Mosel rivers. His reputation among friends as “a gay blade” suffered after he met Anna Purnell, a young YMCA volunteer from a privileged Chicago background who helped entertain the 89th Division troops. She was lovely, with wavy, Titian hair, a woman of “rare personal charm,” in the judgment of Colonel Lee. Somervell married her on August 28, 1919, in the Kaiser’s private chapel in Koblenz. A year later, Somervell returned to the United States with his wife and the first of three daughters.

    Magnitude never seemed to bother him

    More than one major controversy in Somervell’s career presaged the splash he would make with the Pentagon, including the tempest that arose while he served as District Engineer for Washington, D.C. In 1929, Somervell pondered a grandiose scheme to make the Potomac River the national waterway by connecting it with the Ohio River. It was a dream first pursued 135 years earlier by George Washington, who began building a canal that would have tied the fledgling country to the lands west of the Allegheny Mountains. The modern project would construct twenty-seven dams to turn 185 miles of the Potomac’s upper reaches between Washington and Cumberland, Maryland, into navigable water; it was an enormous undertaking that Somervell reluctantly concluded would be prohibitively expensive. Instead—perhaps as a consolation—he advocated tackling a portion of the project. Somervell wanted to dam the Potomac at two points upriver from Washington, including at Great Falls, a scene of primeval beauty where the powerful river cascades over a series of jagged boulders, falling seventy-six feet in less than a mile.
    Somervell was pitted against a formidable foe: Lieutenant Colonel Ulysses S. Grant III, grandson of the Union general, who was executive officer of the National Capital Park and Planning Commission. He was well-known in Washington, having led what the newspapers dubbed the “war on neckers” during the summer of 1928. Grant demanded that visitors to Washington parks sign a pledge promising to “refrain from any action, posture or public display of amorousness that might be offensive to others or could set a bad example to the children.” Despite his disapproval of park romances, Grant was a lover of nature, and he was appalled by Somervell’s proposal to flood majestic Great Falls. His planning commission came down squarely against the plan.
    Somervell was not the least intimidated about taking on a brother officer of the Corps of Engineers, even one who outranked him and bore such a famous name. To the contrary, Somervell publicly ridiculed Grant, issuing a statement to the press calling Grant’s criticism “too far-fetched to claim the attention of any thinking person, much less an engineer who is supposed to know about such matters.” Congress, however, sided with Grant and soon passed a bill that established an extensive park system along the Potomac, including at Great Falls.
    The whole affair was vintage Somervell, from the supremely confident case he made for building the dams to his fury at anyone—Grant, in this case—who tried to stop him. Most notably, it laid bare Somervell’s deep, almost megalomaniacal passion for operating on a grand scale. Building huge ammunition depots during the Great War had merely whetted his appetite. He saw himself as a builder, and the bigger the project, the better. “Magnitude never seemed to bother him,” said General John Hardin, a fellow Army engineer. “I think he loved the bigness of